This Summer’s Most Unforgiving RPG Puts Skyrim Through a Valheim Survival Test

Outward 2 is not here to make you feel powerful, and that is precisely why you should be paying attention to it. Nine Dots Studio’s follow-up to their 2019 cult hit has an active open beta and lands on Steam Early Access on July 7th, but it arrives at a moment when the open-world RPG landscape is lousy with chosen ones, divine destinies, and enemies that politely scale to your level. Outward 2 offers none of that—and in refusing, it makes a more compelling case for what adventuring should actually feel like.

I say that as someone who has chewed through Souls games on challenge runs and played more punishing RPGs than I care to count. The original Outward (by a vast margin) still sits at the top of that pile, not just because of the difficulty in a traditional sense, but because of the specific kind of pressures it applies: being penniless and underprepared, with no safety net or guide for what’s beyond the horizon. It’s remarkable how literally it takes the idea that “everything can kill you, and most of it will” to heart, and the sequel looks set to tighten every one of those screws.

While comparing Outward 2 to Skyrim or Valheim may seem vague, it’s important to differentiate between what these games are and are not. Skyrim hands you keys to a divine bloodline inside the first ten minutes, while Outward 2 hands you a backpack and wishes you the best of luck. The game’s world of Aurai is plainly dispassionate toward you and who you are, and the hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and brutal weather will kill you just as efficiently as anything with claws. There is no fast travel to bail you out, and no mount to make the distances feel smaller.

What the game offers instead is the textured experience of a realistic life. The contrast between grueling routine and clutch crisis management is where Outward’s unique heart has always lived, and the sequel doubles down on it by adding a full four-season cycle across four distinct regions, each with its own biomes, weather hazards, and environmental dangers that shift with the calendar.

Characters That Earn Their Status

But on the other end of the spectrum, much like Valheim or Skyrim, Outward 2 maps character growth through lived experience. The exercise system replaces traditional leveling, and passive abilities emerge from what you actually do, whether that’s how you fight, what armor you wear, or how you’ve been casting spells. You can only choose three breakthroughs from eight available trainer skill trees, so every build involves a serious sense of commitment.

Gearing Systems That Demand Consideration

That commitment carries over into inventory management, too, which has always been a core ingredient in Outward’s secret sauce. Every item you carry has weight, but where most games turn that into a “can I actually walk or not” test, Outward and its sequel trust you to make your own judgment calls, even in combat. In any of Outward 2’s ranged or melee encounters, you can drop your backpack entirely to stay nimble, then retrieve it after the threat has passed. A new mule companion can carry inventory across regions, addressing one of the first game’s biggest friction points, though its vulnerability in combat means it has to be left at mule posts before entering dangerous territory.

Updated Combat That Still Punishes The Unprepared

Every convenience in Outward 2 comes with a tradeoff attached, and learning to navigate those tradeoffs, or to mitigate these vulnerabilities, is the game. That said, the melee combat in the original Outward was often criticized for being too clunky, and Nine Dots has spent years listening to that feedback; the sequel features overhauled animations and more fluid transitions between dodge, block, attack, and skills—but the philosophy hasn’t softened. Enemies are bigger and meaner than you, and jumping in without a plan is still a reliable way to end up in a ditch.

Spellcasting in the Outward sequel remains very involved—you won’t be flinging fire with a single button press; you’ll be setting up elemental sigils and layering reagents to unlock your arcane toolkit. And defeat works differently here, too, as losing a fight can trigger scenarios where time passes, gear is stolen, or status effects are applied. There is no checkpoint, and no way to reload, so you live with what happens, and you adapt to wounds like a sprained ankle that can prevent sprinting or dodging until treated with the right supplies.

Three Million Players See A World Worth Surviving

Similarly to AA RPG success stories like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the original Outward surpassed three million players on the strength of an idea that, at least on the surface, should have been a tough sell: an intensely difficult open-world RPG where you’re just a regular person, and where the world’s indifference to your wellbeing is a feature. And just like KCD and its sequel, Outward 2 feels like the version of that original game Nine Dots always wanted to make. With an expanded team and years of community feedback absorbed into every system, it’s plain to see that this is a sequel that knows exactly what it is, and for people like me who enjoy that sort of thing, it’s remarkably exciting.

So, if your ideal summer title is a sweeping cinematic RPG story with quest markers and a protagonist the world bends itself around, Outward 2 is going to fight you on every front. But if you’ve ever wanted an open-world RPG that treats preparation as utterly essential, or one that makes the walk between towns feel completely uncertain in terms of the likelihood of survival, Outward 2 is a game worth clearing your calendar for when it launches into Early Access on July 7, covering the first of four planned regions. And for those who can’t wait, the Outward 2 open beta that includes over ten dungeons to test your mettle in is live until June 22.